While the rest of the world is falling over themselves trying to make money by converting trees into liquid fuel and burning it for endless purposes, the Berkeley Voice reports that the city of Berkeley, California, has discontinued the use of biodiesel in its fleet vehicles. The reason is that when the biodiesel policy was first instituted in 2003, the supply came mostly from used restaurant cooking oil, but has now gradually transitioned to a supply that is farmed from soybeans. (This trend indicates that overall, the supply of used vegetable cooking oil is not enough to serve entire municipalities. Sooner or later one must resort to farmed biofuels.) Widespread farming of soybeans for use as biofuel is also not efficient at all, and displaces other food crops, uses valuable water resources, and required tons of petroleum-based fertilizer to grow.
Berkeley city officials have realized that, "Although biodiesel pollutes less than regular
diesel when it comes out of a tail pipe, the farming involved to
produce crop-based biofuels actually increases pollution worldwide." Let's hope other municipalities and governments realize this scientific fact before multinational corporations raze the entire southern hemisphere to plant their genetically modified fuel crops for recreational and business use by developed countries.
